Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [2]
Will we be able to watch sexual stimulus migrate to different parts of the brain as procreation and pleasure get further unhooked? Stand back, Michael Crichton—this isn’t the science fiction of time machines or nano-technology run amok. It is Martin Lindstrom and he’s got another great book.
INTRODUCTION
Let’s face it, we’re all consumers. Whether we’re buying a cell phone, a Swiss antiwrinkle cream, or a Coca-Cola, shopping is a huge part of our everyday lives. Which is why, each and every day, all of us are bombarded with dozens, if not hundreds, of messages from marketers and advertisers. TV commercials. Highway billboards. Internet banner ads. Strip mall storefronts. Brands and information about brands are coming at us constantly, in full speed and from all directions. With all the endless advertising we’re exposed to every day, how can we be expected to remember any of it? What determines which information makes it into our consciousness, and what ends up in our brains’ industrial dump of instantly forgettable Huggies ads and other equally unmemorable encounters of the consumer kind?
Here, I can’t help but be reminded of one of my numerous hotel visits. When I walk into a hotel room in a strange city, I immediately toss my room key or card somewhere, and a millisecond later I’ve forgotten where I put it. The data just vanishes from my brain’s hard drive. Why? Because, whether I’m aware of it or not, my brain is simultaneously processing all other kinds of information—what city and time zone I’m in, how long until my next appointment, when I last ate something—and with the limited capacity of our short-term memories, the location of my room key just doesn’t make the cut.
Point is, our brains are constantly busy collecting and filtering information. Some bits of information will make it into long-term storage—in other words, memory—but most will become extraneous clutter, dispensed into oblivion. The process is unconscious and instantaneous, but it is going on every second of every minute of every day.
The question is one I’ve been asked over and over again: Why did I bother to write a book about neuromarketing? After all, I run several businesses, I constantly fly all over the globe advising top executives—heck, I’m home only sixty days out of the year. So why did I take time out of my already time-starved schedule to launch the most extensive study of its kind ever conducted? Because, in my work advising companies on how to build better and lasting brands, I’d discovered that most brands out there today are the product equivalent of room keys. I realized that, to clumsily paraphrase my countryman Hamlet, something was rotten in the state of advertising. Too many products were tripping up, floundering, or barely even making it out of the starting gate. Traditional research methods weren’t working. As a branding advisor, this nagged at me to the point of obsession. I wanted to find out why consumers were drawn to a particular brand of clothing, a certain make of car, or a particular type of shaving cream, shampoo, or chocolate bar. The answer lay, I realized, somewhere in the brain. And I believed that if I could uncover it, it would not only help sculpt the future of advertising, it would also revolutionize the way all of us think and behave as consumers.
Yet here’s the irony: as consumers, we can’t ask ourselves these questions, because most of the time, we don’t know the answers. If you asked me whether I placed my room key on the bed, the sideboard, in the bathroom, or underneath the TV remote control, consciously, at least, I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea. Same goes for why I bought that iPod Nano, a Casio watch, a Starbucks Chai Latte, or a pair of Diesel jeans. No idea. I just did.
But if marketers could uncover what is going on in our brains that makes us choose one brand over another—what information passes through our brain’s filter and what information doesn’t—well that would be key to truly building brands of the future. Which is why I embarked on what would turn out to be a